Urban Fable Construct

Nowadays, the Nostalgia for Shanghai has formed the narrative background of urban allegory, and it has become a kind of cultural fashion or consumption hotspot, brought forth the collective imagination about Shanghai. The nostalgic imagination not only reviews the history but also continues the interrupted urban experience, and relives the unfinished imagination of modernity as well. On the one hand, it points to the feelings of cultural identity; on the other hand, it mixes the consumption and constructs the visual simulacrum in the urban consumer space. This post-modern landscape has become a unique social phenomenon. Shanghai is longing to define itself by a universal modernity in order to explain the original myth of a history of the city and reflect its past urban experience to the future development. The post-modern nostalgic aesthetics has showed the benefit relations among the different ideologies, it has become a kind of cultural representation of the urban modernity and has reflected the complex identity structure of the present Shanghai.